Why Poland Cares So Much About Ukraine

By Padraic Kenney

March 9, 2014

Bloomington, Ind. — An old train route south from the eastern Polish city of Przemysl passes through Ukrainian territory, then back into Poland. The tracks are a relic of the prewar past, when this was all Polish territory, before the Soviet Union “liberated” western Ukraine in 1939 from Poland and incorporated it into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In the Communist period, some traveled this loop — no stops allowed — only to get a glimpse of a land then forbidden and inaccessible. But in 1980 and 1981 the brief Soviet excursion became a propaganda jaunt for Poles. Passengers flashed Solidarity signs from opened windows, boasting to their neighbors of the dissident trade union whose rapid growth threatened the Communist monopoly on power in Poland.

Before long, the Soviet regime insisted windows be kept shut on their territory, and eventually their Polish comrades suspended the route. A decade later, his country and Communist rule were gone, and Poles and Ukrainians could get closer than through the grimy window of a lumbering passenger train. But the emotions of that old train route still illuminate the fears and hopes that now make Poland a central player in the sharpest European crisis since 1989.

For the last quarter-century — the first time in modern history — Poles have not faced an existential threat from the East. But within living memory, Poland lost its eastern provinces when Hitler and Stalin carved it up in 1939; in 1945, the loss became permanent in a redrawn Poland that now included former German lands. So invasions, dismemberments and wholesale remappings of nations are not implausible to Poles. The idea that Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, could simply send his troops to occupy and effectively annex territory from Ukraine without real provocation may have seemed fantastical from farther away, but not from Warsaw.

Today, Poland is a member of NATO and can summon its allies to consult when it feels under threat, by invoking Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty, as it did last week. Poland “is threatened in the broad sense of that word,” Gen. Stanislaw Koziej, chief of Poland’s National Security Bureau, explained in an interview. “It is true that today we are not threatened directly by an attack of foreign troops on our territory, but over a longer term we cannot exclude the possibility.” And when Mr. Putin gave a rambling news conference last week that some Westerners thought held reasons for optimism, Poles heard a direct threat to their own country in his accusation that the snipers on Kiev’s Independence Square had been trained in Poland.

Yet before we all dust off our Cold War textbooks and revive their Manichaean pronouncements, we should note that more than just geopolitics changed when the Soviet Union collapsed and the European Union grew eastward. First, naked anti-Russian emotions ceased to be an essential part of Polish rhetoric. Most Poles today are too young to have had required Russian-language classes in grade school. Russia is a difficult trade partner, but not an affront to one’s very Polishness.

A more important theme in Polish thinking has its birth in those signs flashed from train windows decades ago. Poles believe they have a special message, even a special gift, to convey to those around the world who struggle for liberty and civil rights, and especially to Ukraine.

The two nations are drawn together more by a painful past than by common threads. Ukrainian peasants once worked for Polish noblemen. After World War I, the Polish Army helped dash Ukrainians’ brief hopes of independence. World War II brought horrific massacres to both populations, from many directions, and ended with vast ethnic cleansing.

But from this pain came a slow discovery of common ground. Both sides took the idea of “solidarity” to mean a shared struggle against dictatorship.

In the 1980s, Polish and Ukrainian anti-Communists began talking about the darker moments of their nations’ histories, trying to overcome deep mistrust. In 1989, the Polish dissident Adam Michnik was cheered when he addressed the founding congress of Ukraine’s first mass opposition movement. In 2004, during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Kiev’s streets were full of young Poles alongside Ukrainians.

It seemed then that Ukraine was experiencing the same democratic carnival that Poland and other former Eastern bloc states saw 15 years before. Even when the Orange Revolution ended in political squabbles, Polish fascination with Ukraine persisted. In the European Union, Poland has consistently advocated for Ukraine.

There can be a whiff of condescension in this championing of Ukrainian aspirations, especially when many Ukrainians have encountered Western prosperity working as domestics in Warsaw homes. The Polish online weekly Kultura Liberalna warned recently that Poles were adopting a “postcolonial” attitude to Ukraine. It cautioned that magical thinking about Ukrainian democracy was no substitute for concrete support.

True enough. But Poland’s perspective on Ukraine is from very close up. Poles, too, have seen their territory taken and blood spilled on city squares. They have also seen popular determination and grass-roots organizing lead to democracy. And they see a turn toward Europe as a moral choice, not one that simply brings prosperity and stability.

The idealism of 1989 has been combined with a pragmatic, firmly institutional view of international relations. It makes Poland a formidable player in Europe, and an essential friend to Ukraine.

Padraic Kenneyis a professor of history and international studies and the director of the Russian and East European Institute and of the Polish Studies Center in the Indiana University School of Global and International Studies.